Chapter 2
Chapter Two
He wasn’t going to go and get a pastry this morning.
He didn’t need to see her again. Not after she had come up to his place yesterday unannounced, looking like a little pink confection in that short floral dress.
Violating his space. Not listening when he had told her he didn’t want anyone coming on his property.
No respect at all.
He didn’t need to go get a pastry because he didn’t want to see her again.
And yet, he found himself driving along the road that would take him to Juniper and Sage bakery before he went to the main barn to begin ranching duties.
Zane didn’t work in the tourist part of the ranch.
Zane worked with the cattle and marginally with the ranch hands.
With Cody’s attention being pulled more and more to the resort, Zane was becoming the boss when it came to the actual ranching operation.
That hadn’t been the plan when he moved out here.
But then, if he was honest, he didn’t have a plan.
He had been like a drowning man, and Cody had been a rope, showing him a path back to brotherhood, which had been missing from his life for a long time.
So he had come out to Oregon. A transplant from Texas, but that seemed like a lifetime ago. He hadn’t called Texas home for a very long time.
He hadn’t called anywhere home for a long time.
He didn’t really call this place home either. It was a place where he hung his hat. He had a bed he could put his boots under.
And he now had access to the best goddamn sweet rolls he’d ever eaten. Of course, now he had a haul of strawberry ones out at his place.
He had eaten four of them. He wasn’t proud of that, and he had thought about her the entire time. Because the only thing sweeter than the rolls was Cara herself.
If there was anyone more off-limits to him in the entire world, he couldn’t readily name her.
Her showing up at his house like that had startled him, because he’d been half convinced that he was having some kind of a fever dream. A waking hallucination that bordered on fantasy.
He’d been coming up from bathing in the creek, half-dressed and still wet, and there she was, holding a little basket, looking up at him with large eyes.
Looking at his body with keen interest.
It made his teeth ache just to remember it, and he should not be stopping at the bakery.
But she always left a sweet for him on a plate in the kitchen.
Half the time, he didn’t see her. Hell, more than half the time.
She was always busy. That was why her assertion about them needing the trail on his property for her to get more business was ridiculous.
The girl had more business than she could possibly handle.
She was undoubtedly swimming in business.
They were just using her to manipulate him. To bug him into saying yes.
They knew you couldn’t tell her no.
That disturbed him. That was probably Walker. The fucker. He was too damned intuitive for his own good.
Though he could absolutely tell Cara no, he just didn’t want to.
Because it was nice to make her smile, he didn’t make very many people smile.
And it was the only thing he could actually offer her.
He pulled his truck into its designated spot behind the bakery and growled as he put it in park. He didn’t bother to shut the engine off. All he was going to do was get out of the truck, go inside, and grab whatever thing she had put in the kitchen for him.
He dropped through the back door, and the other two employees who were there ignored him. They were used to him by now.
Though he noticed that while they were more or less ignoring him, they scampered away fairly quickly as he moved deeper into the kitchen to grab the roll that was left there.
It was a caramel one. No pecans. He had told her that he didn’t like pecans.
But she didn’t sell them in the case without them.
He wondered if she had left one pecan free for him. Then he thought better of it. She had better things to do than make him nut-free rolls.
He went to grab it, and then he heard the sound of a bright, high laugh.
It was early in the morning for somebody to be laughing like that, and he sure hadn’t expected to hear it.
Then he heard the sound of a man’s voice, and then his laughter. Zane frowned, picked up the plate with his roll on it, and stepped near the order-taking window so that he could see the dining room.
Cara was standing out there talking to a customer. A man. She was laughing, looking like she never did when talking to him, but then, why should she? It wasn’t like he ever gave anybody reason to laugh when he spoke to them.
The guy was probably closer to her age than Zane was, and probably didn’t have a metric ton of baggage. At least, Zane assumed, since he was talking and socializing like a normal human being, that he had less baggage than Zane. It was a pretty safe assumption to make.
Airlines had less baggage than Zane.
“Well, if you come back tomorrow, I promise I’ll have something different.” She put her hand on the guy’s shoulder.
“That’s a tempting offer. I was kind of wondering if I could get your number, though. That way, I can make sure that it isn’t sold out before I get here.”
“You can call the bakery,” Cara said cheerfully.
Zane lifted his brows and waited.
The guy persisted. “Well, I don’t want to call the bakery.” He paused, looked down, then looked up. A rehearsed move, in Zane’s opinion. The guy was trying to look bashful while being a persistent dick. “I want to call you. I thought that was a slick way to get your number.”
Cara looked flustered, and even from where he was standing, he was pretty sure he could see her blush from her cheeks all the way up to the roots of her hair.
Well, fuck, she liked this dumbass-rehearsed-bullshit.
“Oh well… sure. Sure. Why not?”
“Why not?” The guy laughed. “That is maybe the least enthusiastic number request acceptance I’ve ever gotten. But you know what, I’m going to take it. You seem like an interesting woman, Cara, and I would like to get to know you better.
“Thank you,” Cara said, but Zane noticed that she didn’t say the same thing about that guy that he’d said about her. Which made Zane feel sort of pettily triumphant.
He had left his truck running. He needed to get back out to it. Instead, he watched as Cara and the guy exchanged phone numbers, and the guy left the bakery.
Zane didn’t know very many local people. He had lived here for a couple of years now, but he didn’t make a habit of going down into town. And even when he did go, he didn’t socialize.
Typically, he went in, got what he needed, and got out. If he kept a sour enough expression on his face, nobody even approached him. He had learned well. He had been making himself unapproachable for a very long time.
Without making the decision to do it, he stepped out of the kitchen and into the dining room, arms crossed. “Who was that?”
Cara turned around sharply, surprised. “Oh, my God!” She pressed her hand to her chest. “Were you hiding in the kitchen?”
“I don’t hide, Cara. I’m here like I am every day to grab my roll.”
“You don’t usually talk to me.”
“Sorry. But I witnessed that little exchange, and I couldn’t help but be curious.”
“You. You’re curious.”
“Just curious who it is.”
“His name is Jackson. He’s the son of The… I guess the former mayor? Carey is his last name. Jackson Carey.”
The name sounded sort of familiar to Zane, but he couldn’t be sure.
It could just be that he’d heard the last name when he was in the military, or some cowboy on the rodeo circuit shared the name.
He heard a lot of names, but didn’t get to know very many people, which meant that all of that could run together pretty easily.
“Well. Are you going to answer if he calls you?”
“I feel honor-bound to let him know the status of the inventory.”
“You know that’s not why he’s calling you.”
“Sure. I guess. So I didn’t pick that up right away. Not really used to men hitting on me. “
“You aren’t?”
That shocked him. He would’ve imagined that they were all over her all the time. She was sweet and feminine, knew how to bake. For a man who wanted to get married and have a wife who took care of his house, of his life, she’d be a real fantasy.
Not for a man like him, obviously.
“No. I lived in the same small town forever. I’m sure that Lila can speak to that, too.
That’s the trouble. Everybody knows you.
Everybody knows your brother. Though in my case, I don’t think they were intimidated by my brother.
I just think I was weird. And more interested in reading and being inside than I was in hanging out.
So it’s not like I was attracting a big social crowd. ”
“See, I would assume that you did,” he said. “Because I would say that you’re friendly.”
“I’m friendly,” she said. “I just don’t go out very much.
I always talked to people at the grocery store, people at the laundromat, people at the vet.
Adults, basically. Because I would run errands for my mom, and that meant that I was doing…
very mundane and grown-up errands from a very early age. ”
He could see that it was supposed to be a negative, but the picture that she painted, of doing errands in a small town, things for her parents, her mom, that made his chest feel sore for some reason. Seems like something he might’ve liked.
If he’d had a family.
She shrugged and continued. “I was basically out of sight, out of mind. In my senior year, I actually finished at home. Because my mom started needing a lot of help, and we couldn’t get in-home care. There wasn’t the personnel or the funding out where we were. It was tough.”
“What did your mom have?”
It wasn’t even seven in the morning, and he’d already asked a very blunt, personal question. He wasn’t the kind of person who asked questions like that, because they were all about getting to know somebody, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had gotten to know somebody.
“Dementia,” she said.